Creating a Network

I started volunteering last week with a domestic violence charity here in the northwest suburbs. It's a great charity called WINGS that helps women and their children who have been displaced by domestic violence. I'm working at their charity shop, sorting donations, straightening racks and this week I plan to learn the register. It's a great program with a safe house for the women and three charity shops that help support the safe house. The clients in the program can even come to the store and "shop" for free for their families. I was told each is given an allotment for the store based on family size.

In addition to getting out of the house every once in a while, I'm hoping that I'll meet some people around here and be able to network as I'm helping out. I've never actually tried networking as a formal thing before, so this is new. My boyfriend recently started a volunteer gig too. His has the possibility of being a paying position though, so it's a little different. The concept of networking is still the same though. Hobknobbing with employed people and hoping that like a virus or something, it rubs off.

Everyone says networking is the key to finding something in a down economy or any economy for that matter. I hope they're right. Because I'm beginning to think unemployment will be the death of me. After nearly a week, my tension headache has finally started to ease, thanks in part to the monetary help of a friend. This help will get me through one more month of expenses, one more month to find a job. And I know, I should be optimistic, and think that I will finish June employed but that's easier to write than believe. When March went out like a lamb and no job had come to claim me, I was alright. I mean it had only been a month, April would be much better- I'd definitely be employed by my birthday. Now my birthday is a month behind me and all that looms across my future is endless job ads, like the rainbow on the horizon. It seemingly has no real end point or a true beginning it just arcs into the mist.

I wish my recent good news fortune cookie would have been a little more time specific when it said, "struggle has ended. happier times are ahead." Just when, oh fortune cookie gods, is that supposed to happen?